JVAnimeReviews

Positive

*Let’s start with the overall set-up of Mayoiga because that was something that I found to be really interesting. The concept of people having psychological scares and them trying to get over them is always successful in gathering my interest. As I said multiple times before on other reviews: I love psychological anime’s and Mayoiga used that to its fullest advantage. It’s also something that we can extrapolate to real life, everyone has their scars. Everyone has their things that happened in the past that they would rather forget about. And seeing anime characters trying to get over their scars maybe makes you think about your scars as well.

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*Related to the previous point are the backstories. The backstories were pretty fucking sad. In my opinion especially those of Lion and the main character Mitsumune. Now the fact that we also got backstories for a big part of the characters was to be expected since that’s vital for a psychological mystery anime that Mayoiga was. I also did have some problems with the backstories which I will get to in a minute.

*My final positive point was the conclusion of Masaki’s story. The truth about who Reiji really is, is something that I didn’t expect. Now I can’t go into too much detail about who Reiji is since that’s something that you only discover later in the anime. But that truth was a welcome surprise.

Negative

Now if you have been following the episodical reviews of Mayoiga than you know that this anime wasn’t very popular and by many it was portrayed as trash. And that was because Mayoiga had some issues.

*The first issue, and also the most distinguished feature of Mayoiga, were the characters. 30 characters was too much for this anime. Now I personally didn’t have a problem with 30 characters but the mistake that Mayoiga made was that it tried to make all of those characters equally important. And that was way too much. 

For starters, our 2 supposedly main characters Mitsumune and Masaki didn’t really feel as main characters, especially Mitsumune. The time that was spent on them wasn't proportionally bigger then the time spent on other characters. Characters like Valkana and Hayato were treated equally important with the same amount of screen time. Mayoiga would have better off by leaving at least 20 of those 30 characters as screen filling. It would have been okay for them to be there but without names or purposes in the anime, just as screen filling.

*And this also created the problem of time distribution between the characters. Some characters from the first halve of the anime like for instance Lovepon get a backstory but slowly and silently disappear in the second halve. And the opposite happened as well, in the second part of the anime we have for instance Nanko who plays an important role in reaching the final conclusion. But from her we know nothing, no backstory what so ever while for characters like Lion and Jigoku we do get one but they’re not important to the main storyline.

*So overall I can actually summarize Mayoiga’s story as a mess. There was just so many things going on at the same time that it sometimes was really hard to follow. There were too many supplementary things thrown into the story that delivered no extra meaning to the main storyline or the main mystery of Nanaki. Would the anime have been better if, like some suggested, characters would have died, evolving Mayoiga into a survival anime? Maybe yes but I see the way that the creators wanted to take Mayoiga. Unfortunately, the path was way too complicated.

Conclusion

So as a conclusion, do I think that Mayoiga is trash like a lot of people think? No, not really. I have seen anime’s that bored the hell out of me and Mayoiga wasn’t that boring. Although being very confusing at times, I remained interested in what was to come and how everything would turn out. And that’s why I’m going to rate Mayoiga at 3 stars. This series had a lot of potential but unfortunately a lot of went to waste with the overabundance of characters.